Leah Pisciotta’s fear of being left alone and panic attacks started when she was 13 years old, but at the time, she didn’t know there was a name for what she was feeling.
Her fear of a panic attack ultimately led her to skip her middle school graduation.
“I didn’t want to walk it. I was too scared,” she said. “Then me and a friend and my brother walked over there to watch it, and I actually had a panic attack while I was there.”
The nearly 61-year old from San Jose, California, has suffered from agoraphobia most of her life.
“It’s basically ruined my whole life as far as doing things and holding down jobs,” Pisciotta said.
Agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder, is the fear and avoidance of “places or situations that might cause panic and feelings of being trapped, helpless or embarrassed,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
Fear alone doesn’t qualify it as a phobia, Huntsman Mental Institute therapist Taylor Berhow said.
“The first thing to understand about anxiety and fear generally is that it exists on a spectrum like anything else, and so when we talk about diagnosing somebody with an anxiety diagnosis, most of the diagnostic criteria are going to require that the individual is clinically impaired or disrupted by their symptoms,” Berhow said.
Such is the case for Pisciotta.
As a result of her agoraphobia, Pisciotta has never driven more than 15 miles from her home by herself. She also couldn’t be left home alone while her boyfriend, later her husband, went to work. She’d either have to tag along or be dropped off at a friend’s or family member’s home.
After a few years, her agoraphobia started to ease up. But when she began attending West Valley College, panicking returned and she dropped out of school.
“It would kind of come and go,” she said.
She added, “Then I would get jobs and then I would start panicking more, and then I’d have to come home or have my boyfriend come and get me.”
Pisciotta is terrified of having another panic attack. She can’t talk herself out of them, so she avoids situations that could cause them.
“My whole life has revolved around being phobic and I’ve lost every job I’ve had. I’ve lost opportunities to make money like my sisters did and my brother did. So there’s a lot of anger there, too.”
She has tried multiple medications, exposure therapy and intensive outpatient care over the years, but the grip of agoraphobia still comes and goes.
Pisciotta, who now lives with two of her sons, said her symptoms have been worse lately and she has lost her ability to drive again. Her sons now drive her where she needs to go.
“I was agoraphobic when they were born, and I know they missed out on a lot because I couldn’t drive them places and stuff. But they are just — I don’t even know how to explain it. They give me rides to places. They don’t complain," she said.
She is not alone in the fight against fear.
Debilitating fears go beyond phobias such as Pisciotta’s agoraphobia. Individuals with OCD, anxiety and PTSD have also felt the life disruption caused by fear — and some have found a way to thrive despite it.
Reconciling faith and OCD
On an early April morning, Jenny Kempton set a 20-minute timer for her scripture study. After 19 minutes, Kempton had to end her study early as it was time to leave.
While being one minute short of a study goal might not mean much to most people, it did for Kempton, a licensed clinical social worker in Arizona.
She feared God would be mad at her.
“I get this extreme fear like something bad’s gonna (happen) if I don’t do it, like I’m gonna go to heck,” she said.
That’s Kempton’s religious scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
OCD is more than the need for cleanliness and order, which is how it’s commonly portrayed. It’s “uncontrollable and recurring thoughts (obsessions), repetitive and excessive behaviors (compulsions) or both,” according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
In addition to OCD, Kempton has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression.
Kempton’s OCD goes beyond her religious worship.
She must work out for exactly 30 minutes every day, sleep for eight hours and write three things she’s grateful for and why.
Each of those are good habits, but they have morphed into a compulsion.
Kempton had previously tried therapy before enrolling in the OCD Anxiety Center’s treatment program in 2023 as she sought additional professional help.
The OCD Anxiety Center has been around for almost a decade and hopes to expand to 18 locations in the U.S. by the end of the year with three locations already in Utah.
The center boasts a 73% rate of reduction in symptoms through its treatment program this quarter, according to Paul Peterson, its founder and CEO.
“We don’t talk people better,” Peterson said. “We do not explore their past. What we know is they have a malfunction in their brain, and so we’ve created a system to help change what’s happening in their brain.”
The program consists of daily three-hour sessions, five days a week for 10 to 12 weeks.
“It will change the trajectory of their life,” Peterson said.
Through the program, Kempton learned dialectical behavior therapy skills such as mindfulness and distress tolerance to reduce her levels and did what therapists call “exposures” that “loosened up” her OCD.
“I felt like I was free,” she said.
Kempton made so much progress that she graduated early, in just eight weeks.
What hasn’t been helpful for Kempton’s OCD is well-intentioned individuals telling her to not be scared and to “just have faith.”
She has prayed for her OCD to go away, and the more she focuses on getting rid of it, the more obsessed she becomes with getting rid of it, which just makes matters worse. She said she wants people to see OCD and her experience with the disorder as the disruptive condition it is and that she needs to be loved the way she is.
“This is a disease I was diagnosed with very high levels of before entering the OCD and anxiety treatment center. It is a condition that I fight every day. I don’t want it, but it is my challenge on this earth for now. I don’t like the fear, but I fight it with faith,” Kempton said.
She added, “I try to see the God that is my God, not the god that OCD creates. The loving, kind, gracious, merciful Savior and Heavenly Father who love me. The God who I know sees me, my efforts and my reality and that helps so much. It brings me peace amongst the storm. It brings me closer to him.”
Breaking free from fear and PTSD
Following an abusive marriage, Kristynn Bellamy couldn’t stand near a window; she feared her ex-husband could see her.
Nine months into their marriage, Bellamy was taken to the hospital for two weeks and she never went back home. A week after their first wedding anniversary, their divorce was finalized.
Bellamy was told she was “clinically brainwashed” by her ex-husband. The trauma she experienced was so severe that Bellamy still avoided windows and going out in case he’d find her — even after his death.
She’d be diagnosed with PTSD at age 27. She had already been diagnosed with OCD, generalized anxiety and social anxiety.
“It didn’t stop my life like it does often to people,” she said. “I still made it to work — or back then school, whatever — but I was always looking over my shoulders.”
Bellamy, like Kempton, also went through the OCD Anxiety Center’s treatment program for help with her OCD and anxiety.
She had tried talk therapy in the past and enrolled in the center’s program because she didn’t want to be scared anymore, she said.
“I wanted to be able to take family places or be with family longer because I get into a space where I’m like, ‘OK, it’s too much for me. I need to escape,’” she said.
While there, Bellamy also worked on her PTSD.
Prior to beginning treatment, Bellamy hated her ex so much that she couldn’t even look at a photo of him. She had every photo from their wedding destroyed, except for one she let her mother keep, as long as she hid it from her.
She used that one photo to look at as part of her exposure treatment. While looking at the photo, she’d let herself “feel all the feels.”
Through those exposures, her hate dissipated.
Early on, she’d see the photo on her phone and throw her phone across the room. Now, she can look at it, acknowledge the marriage happened and quickly move on to whatever she was doing.
She completes that exposure every couple of weeks even now.
Since finishing the program, Bellamy has decided to go back to school through BYU Pathways to study family history, which is “something that’s really freaking me out because it’s not what I thought I would do,” she said.
“The unknown is very nerve-wracking,” she said.
Normally, she’d be bombarded with thoughts of how her decision will go wrong. Instead, she’s trying to live the OCD Anxiety Center’s motto: “Live uncertain.”
“I’m just jumping, and that’s what I learned is just to jump,” she said.
Bellamy wants to help others through her story and experiences in what she described as a “black, deep hole.”
“There is always hope, and I felt so completely broken, so completely unworthy of anything. I didn’t think that I deserved to be fixed. I didn’t deserve to find happiness or anything like that. And I know there’s others that feel that way, too, and it’s just not true. Am I completely in love with myself? No, not yet, but it’s what I’m working on,” she said.
Bellamy understands how difficult it can be to take that next step to get help, whether it’s for an individual’s sake or their family’s.
“For me, my initial reasons for doing it was actually for my family. They deserved a healthier person in their life. I spend a lot of time with my nieces and my nephew, and they needed somebody who was healthier in the mind and body,” she said.
She believes it’s fine to let your family be your motivation if that’s what you need to seek help, but she noted that your motivation will eventually expand.
“For a long, long time, they were my only why, and if you have to go with that, go with it,” she said. “If I need to do this so that my dog has a better human, then that’s worth it to me, and eventually you find out you are worth it to do for yourself, too.”